One of the things we loose in today’s up to date maps on the web and on our mobiles is how things used to be; the temporal problem of digital maps for want of a better phrase. It’s not that there’s no data on the past, it just doesn’t surface very often.

Crowd sourcing data is a laudable approach. Crowd sourcing data and putting it one a map seems like a good idea. Crowd sourcing data and putting it on a map without any verification or checks? You might not end up with what you originally intended.

Finally Summer has arrived in London just in time to coincide with the annual population exodus known as the summer holidays. But wait. When you arrive at your holiday destination, how do you order a beer? If you’re lucky, you’ll remember some rudimentary French or Spanish from your school days. But what about other languages? Surely there’s a map for this essential information?

If you live in a city for any period of time, you form a mental image of what quantifies certain areas or neighbourhoods. If someone mentions, say, posh London, I instantly think of the area around Mayfair and Knightsbridge. But you could put this personal and biased view on a map?

Some uses of maps have remained relatively unchanged through the ages. We still use them to find out where we are and how to get somewhere else. Governments still use them to say “this is mine, that is yours”. But as our planet has now been pretty comprehensively mapped, we don’t use them to say “I got here first” that much anymore.

There’s a new version of Google Maps for the web but so far it’s not for everyone. You need to request an invite and not everyone gets one of those it seems. But if you’re impatient or curious and don’t mind a tiny amount of technical hackery you can get to test drive the new version without the need to be one of those blessed with a preview invite.

Governments and authorities like maps. They’re a useful way of clearly saying this is mine, that is yours. They’re also useful for saying where you can and more importantly, where you can’t go. This is all too evident in a surprising map of where Russian visitors to the US were permitted to visit during the 1950s.

The boundaries of Europe’s constituent countries have changed a lot in my lifetime. Some countries don’t exist anymore whilst others have come into existence. But it takes a map visualisation to make you realise just how much the map of Europe has changed.